Reversing a city's fortunes takes more than 1 election

Demographics that intensified urban ills need decades and a shared vision of the future to fix, experts say

Nov. 4, 2013

NOVEMBER 26, 1950: Cincinnati is viewed from the top of the old Mt. Adams Incline. Snow blanket structures, buildings and roads downtown, hampering virtually all activity. They skyline at right was almost obscured by the mist in mid-afternoon. Almost the only persons in Greater Cincinnati who were out in force yesterday, 11/26/50, were children. The Enquirer/Herb Heise scanned April 21, 2011

Experienced reporters Jane Prendergast, Sharon Coolidge, John Johnston, Jason Williams, James Pilcher and others will do the work so you have what you need to vote in Cincinnati’s city elections. Always let us know what you need. Contact one of the reporters or political editor Carl Weiser at cweiser@enquirer.com.

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The promises from Cincinnati’s mayoral campaign sound so good: I’ll reduce poverty. I’ll create jobs. I’ll make more people want to live here.

But an Enquirer analysis of city demographic trends back to 1950 shows clearly how difficult those and other promises will be to keep. In fact, none of the 26 mayors who served in the past 60 years was able to stop the worsening poverty, stem “white flight” to the suburbs, keep more families together or boost home ownership. These are all societal issues with which many cities have struggled for years.

Yes, experts say, but it’ll take decades, a lot of money and forward-thinking residents willing to vote not just for what they want now, but what Cincinnatians who live here in 20, 30 and 40 years will need.

“This is every city right now, every city in the Midwest, the Rust Belt,” said Stephen Mergner of Clifton, an American politics and urban governance expert at Georgetown College in Kentucky. “It’s not impossible to turn around. But what’s really most important is the vision for this in the long run. You need very consistent movement toward these goals. You need to ask what the millenials and their children want.”

What they want, he says, is to live where they don’t have to drive, where they can walk to the grocery store, to restaurants.

Greater Cincinnati residents have seen a rebirth in parts of the city’s core – at The Banks riverfront development, in Over-the-Rhine, at Fountain Square and in a newly vitalized Downtown. Some neighborhood business districts have been spiffed up as well. But those improvements have not altered the long-term trajectory of the city as a whole, the Enquirer analysis shows.

The Enquirer compiled demographic data going back to 1950, the year Cincinnati hit its all-time population peak of more than half a million. In the 60 years since:

• Fewer people. The city lost 41 percent of its population, down to 296,550, according to the 2010 Census. The biggest losses came between 1970 and 1980, then 1990 and 2000. The number still declined between 2000 and 2010, but the amount of loss slowed to just over 1.5 percent. In 1950, one of every two residents of the Greater Cincinnati region lived in the city; now, one in every seven. Then, one in every three Hamilton County residents lived outside the city. That number now is nearly two of three. The loss of every person who worked or lived in the city means a loss to the city of 2.1 percent of that worker’s salary. Cincinnati started charging income tax in 1954; it was last raised – to the current 2.1 percent – in 1988.

• The people who remain are poorer. Poverty data do not go back to 1950. But in 1970, one of every six Cincinnati residents lived in poverty. Now it’s one of every four.

Cincinnati’s increase was part of a national, historic high in the number of people living in poverty – 46.2 million in 2010. Toledo, Youngstown and Dayton were among the cities that saw the biggest increases in concentrated poverty between 2000 and 2003, according to a study by the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank.

It isn’t just poverty that is hampering the city. Cincinnati’s median family income, adjusted for inflation, is at $46,331, up from 1950, but down since 1970. It not only remains lower than the national average of $75,568, but that gap is widening.

What kind of practical impact does that gap in wealth have? If Cincinnati’s 62,000 families were earning at the national median instead of nearly $30,000 below it, the city would be taking in as much as $38 million more a year in income tax revenues – with no change in the current tax rate.

• More single people. Two of every three Cincinnati households in 1950 included a married couple. Now that number is one in every four. The high number of single heads of households is reflected in the city’s high rate of childhood poverty. One of every two children in the city is poor, partially the result of many single mothers with children.

• Majority minority. Sixty years ago, Cincinnati was 84 percent white. Now just over 50 percent of its residents are minorities. The gap in income is tied to race and education. While Cincinnati has 31 percent of residents 25 or older in the city having a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 28.2 percent nationally, those degrees are concentrated racially, with a high proportion of white college graduates and far fewer black college graduates.

All these declining numbers are bad for Cincinnati: Concentrated poverty often means more crime, issues with housing and health, less access to groceries, foreclosures, blight, too-few job opportunities and under-performing public schools. So Cincinnati, as it continues to face double-digit budget deficits each year, has to do more with less to cover the basics for its residents, who are increasingly more needy.

Cincinnati isn’t alone. A 2010 white paper by the Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program said: “Few, if any, other states have as many cities that have lost population and jobs as Ohio, or as many cities in need of finding new economic engines and framing a new vision around the reality of being smaller cities.”

The dreaded example, of course, is Detroit, which filed for bankruptcy in July. Also similar to Cincinnati in these ways are Cleveland and Buffalo, N.Y., said professor David Hammack, an urban historian at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

None of these cities “has overcome the legacy of racial disparity and oppression,” he said. “The processes of education and assimilation have moved – much too slowly – forward.”

All similar cities struggle to find enough tax money to maintain basic services, Hammack said. That means none of them can, by themselves, “finance job training, job placement, drug and alcohol rehabilitation and other programs needed to increase the rate of employment among the poor.”

On top of that, they can’t counteract “either the reality of substantial job losses as a result of the Great Recession, whose impact on unemployment continues, or the substantial reduction of federal and state financial aid to local services.”

It’s a benefit to Cleveland, he said, that its nonprofit groups are strong and doing what they can “mostly by encouraging regional collaboration and by stimulating realistic and positive conversation.”

There are good city models, too. Mergner, of Georgetown College, highlighted Chattanooga, Tenn., which is getting good buzz for its LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and sustainability focus, including electric airport shuttles and new greenways for bicycles. Those are building on a revitalization of the riverfront and downtown, which began in the 1980s. A group of young creatives and professionals called CreateHere got the community engaged, helped artists buy $4 million worth of homes downtown, taught an entrepreneurship course that graduated 400 and provided trees to citizen foresters the group trained in tree maintenance.

The Brookings study on Cincinnati recommended strengthening land banks, encouraging shared services and, among other things, developing more urban agriculture.

The city is doing some of all of those things. The Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority, the city/county development arm, is land banking. And more urban gardens are popping up all the time in Over-the-Rhine and elsewhere.

Encouraging shared services? That has long been a tough conversation. Most recently, Mayor Mark Mallory cut off talks about it with Hamilton County because he became convinced the county really wanted to outsource and privatize city services. Qualls says she’ll push it again.

Metro area cooperation has become more important as these trends continue, Hammack said.

“The central city retains many key business, banking, insurance, legal and other activities,” he said.

Mergner, who wrote his dissertation in 2006 on Cincinnati’s stronger mayor system that voters approved in 1999, said the new mayor will need to think big. “Really, it’s the vision thing,” he said, quoting former President George H.W. Bush. “It takes a vision and you have to have goals. And voters need to think."